Last month, the North Carolina Board of Elections unanimously refused to certify the election of Republican Congressman-elect Mark Harris, who beat his Democratic opponent, Dan McCready, by about 900 votes. Harris, the only representative not to be seated when the new Congress ...read more
The government shutdown over president Trump's border wall is a crisis manufactured by one person: Donald Trump. Outside of his rabid base, literally no one wants the giant concrete wall he has been promising, including most of the GOP. Unfortunately for the rest of the nation, ...read more
For its 2018 Person of the Year, Time Magazine has selected a group of journalists who have faced prison time, put themselves at great risk, and, in some cases, given their lives for reporting the truth. Billed as "The Guardians and the War on Truth," they include the staff of ...read more
If you want to understand just how cowardly the supposedly liberal corporate media is in America, witness the firing of CNN pundit Marc Lamont Hill over comments he made about the state of Israel. Speaking at a United Nations meeting on the International Day of Solidarity with ...read more
We've known for a long time that Donald Trump loves to elevate himself to super-human status. We've also known for a long time that words are meaningless to Trump. Very often, his use of words transparently and inadvertently reveal exactly what he's thinking, especially when he ...read more
Yesterday, CNN's Jim Acosta had his White House press credentials suspended after he repeatedly questioned president Trump over his use of the migrant caravan to stoke the fears of American xenophobes. While he and Trump were having at it, a young, female, White House intern ...read more
If you wondered how Trump was going to react to losing the House of Representatives in the midterms, we are starting the get the full picture -- and it isn't good. After threatening Democrats on Twitter and firing Jeff Sessions, Trump has now banned CNN's Jim Acosta from the ...read more
Last night on CNN, Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach got a taste of his own medicine when legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin told him the truth about the draconian voter ID laws he has pushed that have made Kansas the ninth-hardest state in which to vote. Kobach, who is currently ...read more
A video showing Cesar Sayoc, the suspect arrested in connection with the explosive packages that were sent to CNN, President Obama, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, Robert DeNiro and others, at a 2017 rally for President Trump has now emerged. You can view the footage below: ...read more
I'm old enough to remember just a few months ago when the political media came to a screeching standstill because the left was rude to high profile people on the right. People yelling at Mitch McConnell, asking Sarah Sanders to leave their restaurant, flipping Steve Miller the ...read more
Last night on Anderson Cooper 360, panelists Jeffrey Toobin and Kirsten Powers found themselves having to calm down Michael Caputo, whose defense of Brett Kavanaugh turned into a full-on temper tantrum when they called him out on his lies. Caputo, a Republican aide, has worked ...read more
The 2018 midterms are potentially America's last chance to hold Donald Trump and his corrupt administration to account. But now, they have also become a referendum on Brett Kavanaugh and the sham hearings Republicans have foisted upon us. There were many red flags against ...read more
Last Friday, Anderson Cooper 360 aired a panel discussion led by CNN correspondent Randi Kaye where she talked with five Republican women about the allegations made against Judge Brett Kavanaugh by Dr. Christine Blasey Ford. She started out by asking if they believed Kavanaugh ...read more
Nina Turner, the former Ohio State Senator and head of the SuperPAC Our Revolution, has managed to offend almost every reasonable center-left Democrat in the last two years. One of the only prominent African-American women to endorse Bernie Sanders in the primary, she refused to ...read more
There are few things Democrats and Republicans agree on in this bipartisan climate, but one of them is that Chris Cillizza is the absolute worst. He is to journalism what Nickelback is to rock and roll, or Michael Bay is to film - and at least they didn't write tons of articles ...read more
Nobody had a worse day yesterday than Sam Nunberg, the former Trump aide who, in a series of interviews on the three major news networks, grew increasingly unhinged as he announced his intention to violate both Robert Mueller's subpoena to provide emails between him and Trump ...read more
Since he joined the Senate in 2011, Marco Rubio has been one of most feckless members of Congress. Once considered the potential savior of the GOP for his Latino heritage, he has embarrassed himself every time he takes the national spotlight, whether reaching for his water ...read more
At one point, Elizabeth Lee Beck had a semblance of credibility. In July 2015, the New York Times reported that she and her husband Jared, two lawyers from Florida, had grilled Donald Trump in a foreclosure deposition. When they took a break so that she could pump breast milk ...read more
Last April (which seems like a lifetime ago), President Trump fired missiles at Syria in retaliation against Assad's use of chemical weapons on his people, and the "liberal" media praised him. MSNBC anchor Brian Williams repeatedly called the missile strike "beautiful," and the ...read more
If you haven't already heard, one of Trump's white male followers was arrested in Michigan for repeatedly calling CNN and promising to kill them for being "fake news": “Fake news. I’m coming to gun you all down. F‑‑‑ you, f‑‑‑ing n‑‑‑‑‑s.” The caller then clicked off.Three ...read more
When you combine the organizational skills of Donald Trump and the web expertise of the RNC, you get 2018's “Fake News Awards,” -- an event that crashed quite literally as soon as it was launched (via The Daily Beast): The Republican National Committee on Wednesday night ...read more
This weekend, White House Senior Policy Advisor Stephen Miller was forced out of a CNN studio after Jake Tapper cut him off in an interview for "[wasting] enough of my viewers' time." Miller spent the interview praising Donald Trump and bashing the media, which anyone who's read ...read more
For your Sunday viewing pleasure, take a minute and watch CNN"s Jake Tapper incinerate hapless Trump advisor Stephen Miller after a non-stop stream of nonsense, then cut his mic mid-sentence: The interview was supposed to be about the claims made by former White House chief ...read more
Donald Trump was up early Saturday morning thinking hard about what to say to his 43 million Twitter followers. Tired of being lampooned by the media as being an incompetent idiot with potential brain damage, Trump put on his very best writer's cap and produced a stunningly ...read more
The Banter Long Read: ...in reporting on this new development, the Post's rival newspaper, the New York Times, has been caught lying about its relevance. Worse, their lies could undermine the legitimacy of the Russia investigation in the minds of the American public and even ...read more
I haven't commented on the revelation that Harvey Weinstein sexually assaulted and harassed multiple women over the years in Hollywood because it's not an industry I have much interest in and Weinstein isn't a person I know much about. Having read the stories, I'm almost ...read more
Yesterday, The New York Times ran a damning expose of film mogul Harvey Weinstein, founder of Miramax and The Weinstein Company, who is being accused of sexual harassment by multiple women. Because Weinstein has also been a Democratic donor throughout the last few election ...read more
Benjamin Zuskin couldn't sleep. The year was 1952, and as a former member of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee in Moscow, he knew that Stalin could come for him at any moment... To continue reading this article, please go here. A Banter Membership gets you access to the magazine ...read more
If you have a spare 25 minutes and don't mind the prospect of inducing severe psychosis in yourself, sit down and watch Kellyanne Conway lying through her teeth on CNN for the umpteenth time this year. The 'interview' where Brian Stelter essentially gave Conway unfettered ...read more
Donald Trump has been president for less than six months and he's so eroded our sense of what is normal in a democracy that this is not the screaming headline of every newspaper: “White House advisers have discussed a potential point of leverage over their adversary” CNN, the ...read more
These days, a single tweet can start a chain reaction that leads to an army of trolls unleashing harassment both online and sometimes, off it. It’s a bizarre yet hazardous part of our increasingly connected world, especially when the hoards are reacting to what they see as ...read more
Right-wingers like Ann Coulter love to accuse the Left of playing victim, but their skills at playing victim are on par with Daniel Day-Lewis. All you have to do is read any one of The New York Times' profiles of Trump voters who live in blue states and have a hard time to see ...read more
I know you are but what am I? It's a classic come back for kids who want to turn the table on name callers, or who just don’t have anything better to say. And for kids, it often works! When grown adults lean on similar rhetorical devices to redirect, however, it's not funny or ...read more
Over the weekend, President Trump posted a video to his twitter account of himself at a Wrestlemania event grappling and punching a man whose head had been replaced by the CNN logo. Trump hashtagged the tweet "FraudnewsCNN" and "FNN" (Fraud News Network): Remember, this is the ...read more
Fox News is many things, but “Fair and Balanced” has never been one of them. I used to find it bewildering that a cable news channel that so obviously plays the role of Republican mouthpiece had the gall to pretend to be unbiased - and that viewers bought it. Eventually I ...read more
These are trying times, and political discourse isn’t making the world any better. Rather than nuanced and complex discussions about policy and leadership, we find a lot of debate over painfully partisan talking points and 140 character tweets. The end of last week proved no ...read more
Charles J Sykes in The New York Times summarizes the right's defense of Trump so perfectly it should be engraved in diamonds: As the right doubles down on anti-anti-Trumpism, it will find itself goaded into defending and rationalizing ever more outrageous conduct just as long ...read more
So James O'Keefe, whom you may remember from such comical roles as "A$AP Chad, Frat Pimp," "Jail Inmate Behind the Great Mary Landrieu Office Break-In Caper," and "Guy Who Tried and Failed To Lure a Female CNN Reporter Onto a Yacht Filled with Dildos" is in the news again -- ...read more
Kellyanne Conway is a shameless, serial liar who lies so consistently and so effortlessly that it is now impossible to know when she is telling the truth. Over the past week, Conway lied about a massacre occurring on US soil, lied about lying about it, and was then exposed for ...read more
Donald Trump is a malignant narcissist whose self-obsession is so profound and unrelenting that he can tell lie after lie without even knowing he's doing it. It's entirely possible he truly believes the bullshit that regularly comes out of his mouth. Kellyanne Conway is a ...read more
According to a report running at Politico right now, the Trump White House has made a semi-official decision to effectively freeze out CNN, pulling its spokespeople off the network's air for an indefinite period of time. “We’re sending surrogates to places where we think it makes ...read more
If you write about politics, you figured this would be overwhelming. You knew going into it that the Trump administration would be a daily deluge of incompetence, irrationality, corruption and general surreality. You probably even assumed that no matter how bad you imagined it ...read more
We knew this was coming. At his Wednesday press conference, incoming dictator-in-chief Donald Trump intensified his war on the media by refusing to take a question from CNN's Jim Acosta. Trump was angry because CNN had reported on the story that Russia holds compromising ...read more
Eric Boehlert of Media Matters for America called out CNN's Dana Bash and reminded us of how Obama was expected to coddle Republicans while pointing out how unlikely it seems that the same will be demanded of Donald: It's hard to disagree with Boehlert's assertion here. The ...read more
ThinkProgress has had enough of the PR gimmick that is the "alt-right" and have made it official policy to simply call them what they actually are: white nationalists. A reporter’s job is to describe the world as it is, with clarity and accuracy. Use of the term “alt-right,” by ...read more
It's Brooke Baldwin's show, so far be it from me or anybody else not associated with it to tell her how to run it. If she wants to shut down a guest because the language he chooses to use is a bridge too far for her, so be it. But it's unfortunate that she did exactly that ...read more
Donald Trump met with 25 television executives and anchors on Monday and according to Politico, told them that he would like a “cordial” and “productive” relationship with them: According to one source in the room, but he still aired some grievances during the off-the-record ...read more
On Wednesday evening, CNN political commentator Van Jones joined a panel on "Anderson Cooper 360" to discuss America's election of Donald J. Trump. Jones informed the panelists who supported the bombastic self-proclaimed billionaire that they would now have to face the fear many ...read more
When you go to the polls today, here is a thought to fortify you: We are being protected by a "big, beautiful brown wall." Latino turnout in Florida is tracking at 130% of normal, and African American turnout is consistent with the population in Florida, which is 13%. That may ...read more
In the closing days of the election, Trump's personal spinbot, Kellyanne Conway, wants you to take a moment to feel bad for all the sacrifices the Trump family has made over the last 18 months and to remember what a clean, policy driven campaign he's run. Seriously. During an ...read more
